In 2015, New Madrid County Missouri celebrated its courthouse centennial. To mark the occasion, the classical Greek revival courthouse gained a spruced-up stained glass dome over the rotunda, a resurrected 1821 County Seal, new portraits of founding fathers, festive banners surrounding the building and branching down Main Street, and special events for the citizens. This book recounts tales, old and new, of the courthouse. The reader begins in the frontier world of early judges sitting in unheated or stifling log cabins as they sort out justice and bring the law to a wilderness area. Hear how in the old days, the all-male jurors were sequestered in the attic overnight. A sheriff tells how he reluctantly hung two men convicted of murder. He had to do it; he had asked for the office. One official found himself running for office against his own son. This story made news all around the state. Come inside the distinguished courthouse building today, as county officials talk candidly about their current roles as well as recall a few tall tales.

From December 1811 to February 1812, massive earthquakes shook the middle Mississippi Valley, collapsing homes, snapping large trees midtrunk, and briefly but dramatically reversing the flow of the continent’s mightiest river. For decades, people puzzled over the causes of the quakes, but by the time the nation began to recover from the Civil War, the New Madrid earthquakes had been essentially forgotten. In The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes, Conevery Bolton Valencius remembers this major environmental disaster, demonstrating how events that have been long forgotten, even denied and ridiculed as tall tales, were in fact enormously important at the time of their occurrence, and continue to affect us today. Valencius weaves together scientific and historical evidence to demonstrate the vast role the New Madrid earthquakes played in the United States in the early nineteenth century, shaping the settlement patterns of early western Cherokees and other Indians, heightening the credibility of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa for their Indian League in the War of 1812, giving force to frontier religious revival, and spreading scientific inquiry. Moving into the present, Valencius explores the intertwined reasons—environmental, scientific, social, and economic—why something as consequential as major earthquakes can be lost from public knowledge, offering a cautionary tale in a world struggling to respond to global climate change amid widespread willful denial. Engagingly written and ambitiously researched—both in the scientific literature and the writings of the time—The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes will be an important resource in environmental history, geology, and seismology, as well as history of science and medicine and early American and Native American history.

Previously published as: The New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-1812.

This is an unabridged reprint of the first book and first thorough scientific work ever published on the great New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-12. The winter of 1811-12 experienced the greatest burst of seismic energy in the history of the original 48 states. Geologist, Myron Fuller, spent several years in the field between 1900-1905 scouting the New Madrid fault zone on foot and on horseback, mapping the consequences of these giant cataclysms that had so permanently and so profoundly changed the landscape of this region 90 years before. Originally published by the U.S. Geological Survey, this book is the starting point for all serious researchers on these world-class temblors. Foreword to this 1995 printing is by seismologist, David Stewart, Ph.D.

This eBook has been edited as of October 2018. After the central section of the United States experienced the devastation of the New Madrid Earthquake and Flood, two billionaire contractors came up with a plan to build the world's first totally self-reliant underwater city. Alistair Reynolds, one of the billionaires had lost his wife when the Great Crevasse swallowed her up while on a business trip in Memphis, Tennessee. Alistair vowed to provide a place safe from any future destruction that might happen again. Built in the central section of the New Madrid Sea it was christened New Madrid City.